I composed the poems in Dear Nostalgia in 2020 and 2021. I had recently changed jobs, a move that gave me much more writing time, but I was also living through a pandemic that caused the cancellation of all my planned travels and resulted in me working from home for most of that two-year period. My writing focus at the time was primarily on Boulevard (Beir Bua Press, 2021) and Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (Beir Bua Press, 2023), but individual poems that were not part of either book project kept insisting on being written, often in the early hours of the morning. The fact that I was unable to visit my family and friends in my homelands, Australia and Ireland, caused me to spend a lot of time thinking about my past, separation from loved ones, and what the Australian historian Manning Clark referred to as “the tyranny of distance.” I often found myself lying awake before dawn, wishing I could get back to sleep, and, more significantly, yearning to be in places I love with people I love.
During the period when I wrote the poems in Dear Nostalgia, I taught graduate and advanced undergraduate poetry classes in which I required my students to write in at least half a dozen forms and encouraged them to experiment and take risks with their work. I don’t ask my students to try any writing exercises that I haven’t attempted myself, so the subject matter that I needed to write about ended up inhabiting forms I was teaching and experimenting with, including sonnets, tanka, villanelles, a pantoum, erasure and found poems, and a semi-acrostic poem that takes the first word of each line from the chorus of The Waterboys classic The Whole of the Moon. I participated in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project in May 2021, writing a new poem each day for thirty days – that same month I travelled to visit my mate Sean in Youngstown, New York, so a few poems from that trip and the thirty I wrote that month ended up in the collection.
Each of the poems in Dear Nostalgia were composed as stand-alone poems and were not written with a unifying theme or future collection in mind. However, during the autumn of 2022, while reading through poems that had been published in journals and anthologies over the previous two years, a few central themes emerged, and it was clear that I had a few dozen poems that would fit together (I whittled it down to twenty). I decided to end the collection with the poem “Dear Nostalgia” and to use its title for the collection. I’ve been interested in nostalgia, its power and effects, and the way it is perceived in the poetry and academic communities for decades (I’ve even considered writing a theoretical book about it), so it seemed like it was about bloody time that I centered a collection specifically around nostalgia. The poems are not just concerned with the past and my relationship to it, but also the distances I have travelled, both through time and space (literally and metaphorically) – hence the title of the opening poem, “Chronotope.” The settings of the poems move from my birthplace in Warrnambool in 1973 to Ballarat and Shepparton in the 1980s, Melbourne in 1992, London and Dublin in the mid-1990s, then Iceland, Rome, Western New York and Fort Worth in the recent present.
Just a few weeks after I finished putting the collection together, and two days before my daughter’s 16th birthday, rob mclennan sent a perfectly timed email from Ottawa – “should we be thinking of another chapbook, maybe?” (My chapbook BLUE was published by rob’s above/ground press in 2020). Now, four months later, Dear Nostalgia is at the printers, almost ready to embark on its travels across Canada and the United States, to Australia and Ireland, and hopefully to any location where a poety chapbook may receive a welcome (even if it is a time and space oddity).
Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O’Reilly teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. His ten collections include Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (Beir Bua Press, 2023), Dear Nostalgia (above/ground press, 2023), Boulevard (Beir Bua Press, 2021), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), BLUE (above/ground press, 2020) and Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017). His work appears in over one hundred journals and anthologies published in fourteen countries, including Another Chicago Magazine, Anthropocene, Cordite, The Elevation Review, Identity Theory, New World Writing Quarterly, Trasna, Westerly and Wisconsin Review. He is poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.